Until recently, the meaning and origin of the Canadian university degree was well understood by Canadians and around the world. Degrees were only offered by universities and the use of the label university was controlled by legislation in each of the ten provinces and three territories. Institutional membership in the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada signified that an institution was a university-level institution. However, the increased demand in the last two decades of the 20th century for access to university level degrees has resulted in the provincial-level approval of degrees that are offered in non-university settings. As a result of the increased proliferation of these non-university delivered degrees, the provincial level degree
accreditation processes and the university-level degree granting standards, as represented in the membership criteria for AUCC, are no longer aligned. In this paper, the author traces the changes in degree granting in Canada over the past 15 years or so. Current provincial policies and recent decisions regarding degree granting are outlined.
Context: Educational reform in the United States has had a growing dependence on accountability achieved through largescale
assessment. Despite discussion and advocacy for assessment purposes that would assist learning, provide help to
teachers instructional plans and execution, and give a broader perspective of the depth and breadth of learning, the general
focus still remains on accountability, now elaborated with sanctions for schools and personnel.
One academic’s journey in search of new perspectives.
What you are about to read is an argument for inviting more academics, and academic administrators, to second themselves for periods of time to new roles within and beyond the university. It’s a reflection on three mid-career adventures that taught me more than I bargained for. Returning now to teach tax law and policy at York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School, I realize just how much I’ve learned on the road and how it is energizing my work as a faculty member. Paradoxically, I’m also keenly aware of what I missed by being away. Out of this strange mix, a few ideas are emerging about why we should promote a stronger culture of secondments in academia.
Watching the crackdown on protestors in Turkey four years ago, Ayca Koseoglu, then a recent MA graduate from a university in Ankara, had two thoughts.
“I thought there was no life in Turkey for people like me any more, for academics,” said Ms. Koseoglu, who decided she had to go abroad to continue her education.
Her second thought was that she wanted to research how political movements used public space to stand up to repressive regimes, whether in Turkey, the Middle East or the United States.
The exceptionally sad death of Malcolm Anderson at Cardiff Business School in February should serve as a warning light for universities in both the UK and further afield.
There is a high level of awareness and concern about student suicide, but it is important for every university leader, and perhaps every modern citizen, to realise that in most industrialised nations, including the UK, suicide is predominantly a risk among the middle-aged – and particularly among men in their late forties.
Last semester I reinvented English composition as a community-service learning course. My students did the usual work of any composition course — developing basic writing skills, crafting narrative essays and arguments, conducting research — but it was in the service of creating print and web content for a local homeless shelter.
In their end-of-semester evaluations, students praised the experiment, and I will probably repeat it. But I don’t want to make too much of that particular reinvention, because I have reinvented first-year composition at least a half-dozen times in my 20 years of teaching it, and will no doubt do so again. The same goes for most people I know who teach composition.
If social movements are best conceived as temporary public spaces, as moments of collective creation that provide societies with ideas, identities, and even ideals, as Eyerman and Jamison (1991, p. 4) have argued, then educational researchers have much to learn from movements. Educational processes and contexts are crucial to the ways in which social movements ideas, identities, and ideals are generated and promoted, taught and learned, contested and transformed. Indeed, movements themselves are educators, engaging participants in informal education (through participation in movement activity),
non-formal education (through the educational initiatives of the movement), and even, sometimes, quasi-formal education (through special schools within movements). Moreover, movements are producers of knowledge that, when successful, educate not only their adherents but also broader publics (Crowther & Shaw, 1997; Dykstra & Law, 1994; Eyerman & Jamison, 1991; Hall, 2006; Martin, 1988; Stromquist, 1998).
Background/Context: In many countries, there are multiple studies intended to improve initial
teacher education. These have generally focused on pieces of teacher education rather than wholes,
and have used an underlying linear logic. It may be, however, that what is needed are new research
questions and theoretical frameworks that account for wholes, not just parts, and take complex,
rather than reductionist perspectives.
Purpose: This article examines the challenges and the promises of complexity theory as a framework for teacher education research. One purpose is to elaborate the basic es. A second purpose is to propose a new research platform that combines complexity alism (CT-CR) and prompts a new set of empirical questions and research methods. es. A second purpose i alism (CT-CR) and prompts a new set of empirical questions and research methods.
When I teach workshops about designing the flipped classroom, I always encourage faculty to think carefully about the first five minutes of class. In my lesson plan template, one of the first tasks we discuss when planning in-class time is to prepare what I call a “focusing activity.” A focusing activity is designed to immediately focus students’ attention as soon as they walk in (or log in) to the classroom. When used in conjunction with flipped and active learning classroom models, focusing activities allow you to minimize distractions, maintain momentum between pre-class and in-class activities, and maximize the amount of class time you have to engage students in learning.
Graduate students need to seek out opportunities for collaboration at every stage of their graduate career. Experience working as part of a team is valuable for Ph.D. students preparing for a rapidly evolving academic job market, and it is indispensable for those pursuing careers beyond academe.
If I were the czar of higher education that is not explicitly vocational, I would require every undergraduate to study philosophy. And if I were both czar and czarina, I would require all students to take two philosophy courses — one in their first year and another just before graduation.
At first blush, that requirement may seem bizarre, especially coming from me. I am a psychologist and, more broadly, a social scientist — not a philosopher or a humanist. Even more deplorably, I have never taken a philosophy course myself.
TORONTO -- It is "unacceptable" for publicly funded Ontario colleges to operate campuses outside Canada that exclude women, the premier of Ontario said Friday when asked about two men-only schools in Saudi Arabia.
How students respond to failure is a strong predictor of future success.
Emerging research suggests that for students to fare better, they need to fail better. How students respond to failure is a strong predictor of future success, and the notion of resilience is increasingly prevalent in conversations about higher education. Resilience has a number of characteristics, including levels of persistence, effort, positive mindset,
motivation and self-regulation.
So how do we build resilience into our classrooms? Are there ways to embed resilience into the content we deliver? As a literature professor, I have recently reimagined my medieval romance course as a learning journey about resilience. My premise: chivalric quests can provide a valuable lens to understand the process of transformative learning and provide us with models for normalizing failure as a necessary condition of success.
Traditional pedagogy is premised on a belief that older generations teach younger generations how to learn. At this point in history, however, through their ubiquitous exposure to media, technology, and communication, younger generations understand contemporary forms of communication better and more tacitly than older generations. Yet schooling lags behind advances in communication and technologies, clinging to a concept that older generations still impart knowledge to prepare younger generations for the future. Jake Telluci (2007), a participant in our research study on marketplace production, articulated this discrepancy well, when he said, “It’s about when technology is in the hands of people, they will often just do things with it.” In this chapter, I argue that unveiling new media and digital technologies production practices exposes a logic and language that better serve as a contemporary model of learning. The process of adopting new media is iterative and cyclical in that meaning-makers pick up new media production practices, remix them, and make them their own. Forging a twenty-first century identity entails reappropriating practices and texts consumed on a daily basis.
Last week we reviewed the reappointment, tenure and promotion process. In this article, we will discuss strategies
for assembling your file for it.
The typical file should include a copy of your CV, a narrative and documents providing evidence of your accomplishments in the three areas of faculty work: teaching, research and scholarship, and service. Those three
components of the file should be tightly integrated to tell a compelling story about your accomplishments.
According to the Ministry Education-supported Student Transition Project, about 30,000 B.C. high school grads enrol in post-secondary institutions each year.
Of that number, 17 per cent eventually earn a bachelor’s degree and 21 per cent earn certificates or diplomas of one kind or another.
But post-secondary education, especially a university education, doesn’t come cheap and doesn’t always fulfil its promises.
University tuition and other costs, including books and living expenses, for a Canadian four-year university degree can average more than $60,000, according to BMO’s Wealth Institute report.
In the early 2000s, anyone learning about pedagogy might have encountered “learning styles,” a collection of theories that assert people learn differently, coupled with the advice to teach in ways that include visual, auditory, and/or kinesthetic learning.
Background: Much research has sought to investigate emotions and forms of emotion management among teachers worldwide, including the connection between educational change and teacher emotion; the association between the culture of teaching and teachers’ emotional experience within parentteacher interactions; the link between teacher emotion and teacher beliefs; and the
expressions and sources of a wide variety of emotions in teaching.
Not only are racial, sexual and gender minority groups more likely to be victims of sexual assault, students who consider their colleges inclusive and tolerant are less likely to be victims, two new complementary studies found.
Published recently in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence and Prevention Science, the studies reveal how populations with intersecting minority identities may be at greater risk of sexual assault, emphasizing the need for more sexual assault research and prevention and treatment programs that address specific marginalized groups.
One study, led by a team from the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health, was based on surveys from over 70,000 undergraduate students attending 120 higher education institutions between 2011 and 2013.
The team found that women were 150 percent more likely than men to be sexually assaulted, but that transgender people were at much greater risk -- 300 percent more likely than cisgender men to be sexually assaulted.
The Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (OCUFA) represents over 17,000 professors and academic librarians at 28 faculty associations at every university in Ontario. OCUFA represents full-time tenure-stream faculty, and at many universities also represents contract faculty members who work either on a limited-term contract or on a per- course basis.
OCUFA estimates that the number of courses taught by contract faculty at Ontario universities has doubled since 2000.